A direct link to the city centre for residents of Seabury and West Malahide must be maintained, according to a local Fine Gael councillor.

New National Transport Authority proposals under its BusConnects plan would see the loss of a direct busy service to the city centre from these areas to be replaced by shuttle services to Swords or Clongriffin where commuters could link to Dublin City services.

Cllr Anthony Lavin (FG) proposed a motion to the recent meeting of the Malahide/Howth Area Committee calling on the NTA to preserve a direct bus link from these areas to the city centre.

Cllr Lavin said that on the surface, the BusConnects plans 'sounds wonderful', promising shorter journey times to the city centre for most commuters.

But he said that when it comes to the suburbs of north Dublin 'it seems to be serving people not as well as it could be'.

He said he was encouraging commuters affected by the proposals to make their feelings know on the BusConnects website.

He said: 'I have been agitating to have some kind of service maintained to enable commuters to commute from west Malahide to the city centre.

Cllr David Healy (GP) said: 'It takes effort to understand enormity of these changes' and that a lot of people had misunderstood it.

He said that for example, the Seamount area would have 'a better service with increased frequency' and there would be a more frequent service to schools from Seabury.

But he acknowledged the difficult was in terms of the loss of direct access to the city and on that point, he said there was no reason to drop the 142 service and no reason was given in the NTA report.

He said there was a lack of understanding in the BusConnects report that the Port Tunnel is now part of a major bus route and it was already at the level of efficiency that the NTA were trying to bring other routes up to.

He said the 142 bus route which uses the port tunnel and would be scrapped under the new plans is 'a casualty of the resistance to using the tunnel' but instead, buses should be using the tunnel as much as possible. Cllr Brian McDonagh (Lab) acknowledged there were issues to be addressed in the plans but said that is what the public consultation period is for.